[Peace-discuss] Visiting Israel: manufactured fear, elite 'white fascism', Hamas as an 'intimate strategic partner' of the Israeli gov't -- Fwd: Letter from Tel Aviv

[Stuart Levy via Peace-discuss]

Via Jewish Voice for Peace and UFPJ, this "Letter from Tel Aviv", on a 
leftist Jewish family's experience visiting Israel in the midst of this 
war ...   Some quotes:

> One commentator rightly said that Iron Dome functions as the 
> Deus-ex-Machina of this war. Everyone but us is convinced it saves 
> lives. We see it more as a psychological warfare device. Curiously, 
> much of the explosion sound that gets people so worked up here is 
> largely produced by the Iron Dome system itself. What is striking if 
> not outright suspicious is that there is hardly any information in the 
> aftermath of interceptions; we know nothing about it and nobody cares. 
> [...]
> How come everyone, even in our leftie circles, is so psychologically 
> affected by this war? Why are they so afraid? earlier rounds - the 
> second Intifada with buses and markets exploding - were much more 
> terrifying. Of course far too many are first and foremost afraid for 
> the lives of their loved ones, soldiers and reservists in Gaza. In my 
> family a distant relative was wounded; the brother of a friend is 
> "inside"; The ex of a friend, who I know way back from our military 
> service during the first Intifada, was drafted. [...]

> We attempted to describe the regime of manufactured fear and 
> psychological support for the war, penetrating all aspects of life in 
> all directions. For the vast majority of the country this fear is 
> disproportionate to the actual threat. We described also a climate of 
> threat of violence and violence directed against any form of dissent. 
> In an atmosphere of pending emergency dissent is forbidden and any 
> government action addressing the collective paranoia from the threat 
> of Hamas is seen in a positive light.  [...]  We do not fear to go and 
> demonstrate, we are still able to do that with reasonable safety, but 
> staying safe on the street is a slightly more complicated task than 
> calculating where the nearest building entrance is in case of a siren 
> alarm. 

> Many Israelis, including very young children, incessantly consume 
> updates on strikes and interceptions through the '??red color'?? app. 
> The app with the red icon on their smartphones is decorated with a 
> sound radiation sign resembling the nuclear danger logo. 

> Hamas is seen as a mortal, inhuman enemy, which must be crushed, 
> decimated. In line with Prime Minister Netanyahu it is for many heir 
> to Amalek in ancient times and Hitler. This is no apology but Israelis 
> have been traumatized by the savage campaigns of suicide bombings of 
> Hamas beginning in the 1990s, and so it is psychologically impossible 
> for many to acknowledge that however criminal the actions of military 
> resistance to the occupation sometimes are, in fact as soon as Hamas 
> took power over Gaza in 2006 it became an intimate strategic partner 
> of the militant Israeli government. Mash'al and Bibi are caught like 
> lovers on an airplane about to crash in a deadly embrace for their own 
> survival. 

> Candidates for jobs are asked to write letters renouncing their 
> political opinions. University presidents intervene personally to 
> block '??controversial'?? appointments. Ron Shoval, former leader of 
> Im Tirtzu organizations called to put to use the boycott law, from its 
> sinful inception no more than a dead letter law, to preemptively 
> prosecute and jail human rights defenders.

> We encounter both this white fascism running through the main echelons 
> of Israeli society, and the street fascism, those small but well 
> organized gangs of the extreme right who mobilize to beat and 
> intimidate anti-war protestors when they take to the street. In the 
> cultural war raging here it is the Mizrahi face of the extreme right 
> chanting '??death to Arab'?? on the street that grabs all the 
> attention. Haaretz is covering this Mizrahi extreme right extensively. 
> Indeed, it is perceived by lefties especially as menacing, as the 
> '??sewage'?? flooding civilized Israel. But, *the white fascism of 
> university presidents or Im Tirtzu is far worse, far more dangerous. 
> One Ron Shoval is more effective in crushing dissent than a thousand 
> street gangs.* Those are the people who really hold the key to a 
> complete breakdown of the façade of Israeli democracy.



-------- Original Message --------
Subject: 	Re: [ufpj-activist] Letter from Tel Aviv
Date: 	Mon, 4 Aug 2014 00:34:46 -0400
From: 	David McReynolds <davidmcreynolds7 at gmail.com>
To: 	ufpj-activist <ufpj-activist at lists.mayfirst.org>






On Fri, Aug 1, 2014 at 7:14 PM, viviane lerner <vlerner2011 at gmail.com 
<mailto:vlerner2011 at gmail.com>> wrote:

    http://jewishvoiceforpeace.org/blog/letter-from-tel-aviv-hilla-dayan-and-pw-zuidhof



      Letter from Tel Aviv - Hilla Dayan and PW Zuidhof

    Submitted by Anonymous on Thu, 07/31/2014 - 3:21pm

    *Why do Israelis support a costly ground invasion of Gaza? *

    The summer in Israel was planned long in advance. Eager to go, our
    three small children were excited to start their Lego themed summer
    camp. We landed in Tel Aviv in steamy mid July, just when the
    current violence started. As a Dutch-Israeli family from Amsterdam
    that travels frequently to Israel we are used to being teased in
    calmer times about why, for our own sanity, we do not choose a real
    holiday destination instead of a conflict zone. Friends and
    relatives in the Netherlands are now worried. They inquire politely
    as to our safety and wellbeing. On facebook they see our shared
    images of dead and wounded children in Gaza, war horrors, anti-war
    demonstrations, international condemnations, outraged op-eds and
    petitions calling for immediate ceasefire. Pictures from home of
    smiling blond kids in green parks and sunny beaches are flickering
    in glaring contrast to the barrage of depressing feeds from our
    '??vacation.'??

    Our family here knows we are appalled by the war and condemn the
    atrocities in Gaza but there is no point talking about it with them.
    As Israeli and Dutch citizens who want to see an end to the
    occupation our politics combined with the fact that we don't live in
    Israel makes us outsiders, if not outright '??traitors.'?? We are
    naive if we don'??t see that hitting Gaza hard is necessary in
    response to the existential threat of Hamas. The weight of the
    overwhelming support for the war descends upon us daily, heavy and
    inescapable like the 90% humidity in the air. In Kindergartens,
    Pilates studios, hairdressers, office building signs are posted as
    people collect goodies for packages to send to our soldiers in the
    front. Soldiers are on everyone'??s mind since the first smiley
    profiles of dead young man appeared in the news. At night many Tel
    Aviv restaurants and bars are empty or closed. Summer events and
    music concerts are cancelled so our sister and sister-in-law doda
    (aunt) miki the producer has plenty of time to spoil our children.
    This is war.

    One of the many ironies of this '??war vacation'?? is that the war
    and the vacation do coincide. Unlike many Israelis we are privileged
    to be able to take off for several weeks each summer. We got lucky
    with a house swap and stay at the very heart of Tel Aviv, complete
    with its Bauhaus glory and shady broad boulevards. So we take the
    kids on evening strolls on Rothschild Boulevard; hang out at Habima
    square, go to the beach and the pool, occasionally dine out. Our war
    amounts to spending a few minutes in a friendly meet and greet in
    the staircase of the apartment building if we happen to be home with
    the children when the siren is on. At night we do not disturb the
    kids'?? sleep and skip the neighborly meet and greet, like last
    night when the siren went off. It took us few rather disorienting
    days here to slowly come to the conclusion that the palpable
    collective fear is disproportionate to the actual threat.

    Government propaganda, lies and deceptions to galvanize support for
    the war is relentless and the Iron Dome system, the system that
    intercepts Hamas rockets, is just part of it. An expert opinion
    according to which the Israeli population is almost 100% safe even
    without it because of the inferiority of Hamas' weapons and the
    abundance of shelter infrastructure seemed credible. Deep inside, we
    believe, everyone knows that the chance something will happen to you
    here is statistically negligible. It can happen, like the chance of
    dying in a shocking aviation disaster as what happened this summer
    to hundreds of Dutch citizens, but it is very unlikely.

    One commentator rightly said that Iron Dome functions as the
    Deus-ex-Machina of this war. Everyone but us is convinced it saves
    lives. We see it more as a psychological warfare device. Curiously,
    much of the explosion sound that gets people so worked up here is
    largely produced by the Iron Dome system itself. What is striking if
    not outright suspicious is that there is hardly any information in
    the aftermath of interceptions; we know nothing about it and nobody
    cares. The threat of warheads in any case gradually subsides as we
    write giving way to fear from terrorist infiltration from the Gaza
    tunnels. This shift happened within days from the ground invasion,
    which marked a notable decrease in the number of Iron Dome alarms.

    How come everyone, even in our leftie circles, is so psychologically
    affected by this war? Why are they so afraid? earlier rounds - the
    second Intifada with buses and markets exploding - were much more
    terrifying. Of course far too many are first and foremost afraid for
    the lives of their loved ones, soldiers and reservists in Gaza. In
    my family a distant relative was wounded; the brother of a friend is
    "inside"; The ex of a friend, who I know way back from our military
    service during the first Intifada, was drafted. With more than forty
    soldiers dead, it appears that the imaginary threshold of a war too
    costly to wage has not been crossed.

    As we write this, carnage in Gaza and the death of scores of
    soldiers is authorized to continue. Why? The Israeli narcissism that
    concerns itself only with IDF casualties while hundreds of bodies
    pile up in Gaza is nothing new. The logic of war normality we
    experience here in Tel Aviv just confirms it. The soldiers die so
    that we can live '??normally.'?? Violence is inevitable because
    Israel is under attack. One has to be here to understand fully that
    the legitimacy of this war is not just manufactured top down by the
    Israeli government. It is a genuine and widespread social reality.
    Everyone, even those few hundreds opposing the war, us included,
    take part daily in its production. Take for instance the dynamic of
    normal routine interrupted regularly by sirens. In no time, these
    interruptions themselves became a normal routine. We all got used to
    the ??pending emergency?? situation. We are all on an
    emergency-normality switch mode. People stop cars in the middle of
    the road to seek shelter in nearby buildings only to go back behind
    the wheel and honk impatiently at the other drivers as if nothing
    happened; In cafes people nervously react to suspicious sounds, jump
    from their seats to the sound of sirens, and return seconds later to
    their relaxed posture sipping their espressos and so on.

    Many Israelis, including very young children, incessantly consume
    updates on strikes and interceptions through the '??red color'??
    app. The app with the red icon on their smartphones is decorated
    with a sound radiation sign resembling the nuclear danger logo.
    Authorities, institutions, employers, all heighten security
    procedures, producing signs, road signs and flyers with instructions
    on buildings '??safe spaces'??. Municipalities put on giant
    billboards with patriotic slogans, one more offensively patriotic
    than the other. We received a leaflet to parents from the kids'??
    summer camp advising us on how to maintain '??emotional safe
    spaces'?? for our children. On TV mainly men talk: brain-dead,
    repetitive, militaristic tactic-talk. The blogger Idan Landau once
    aptly called this tsunami of public appearances at times of war zman
    hagvarim - "the time of men."  At the same time, the witch hunt of
    dissenters has reached epidemic proportions, targeting many, and
    women especially, who dare speak their minds against the war. Orna
    Banai, Gila Almagor, Shira Gefen are famous celebrities who were
    vilified for speaking out; a Palestinian psychologist working for
    the Lod municipality and many like her got fired for what they
    posted on facebook.

    The Open House LGBT organization in Jerusalem came under attack
    after Elinor Sidi, its director, took a stance against the war. In
    academia, university presidents published statements warning that
    they monitor staff and students expressions on social media and will
    resort to sanctions if they express '??too extreme'?? opinions. This
    blunt assault is what happens publicly. In private, we know from our
    friends, many who are politically colored as unpatriotic or
    anti-Zionist pay a great personal price. Candidates for jobs are
    asked to write letters renouncing their political opinions.
    University presidents intervene personally to block
    '??controversial'?? appointments. Ron Shoval, former leader of Im
    Tirtzu organizations called to put to use the boycott law, from its
    sinful inception no more than a dead letter law, to preemptively
    prosecute and jail human rights defenders. The idea is to prevent
    human rights organizations from reporting to an international
    investigation like the Goldstone commission after operation Cast
    Lead. This witch hunt did not begin yesterday, but the war made
    things much worse. We encounter both this white fascism running
    through the main echelons of Israeli society, and the street
    fascism, those small but well organized gangs of the extreme right
    who mobilize to beat and intimidate anti-war protestors when they
    take to the street. In the cultural war raging here it is the
    Mizrahi face of the extreme right chanting '??death to Arab'?? on
    the street that grabs all the attention. Haaretz is covering this
    Mizrahi extreme right extensively. Indeed, it is perceived by
    lefties especially as menacing, as the '??sewage'?? flooding
    civilized Israel. But, the white fascism of university presidents or
    Im Tirtzu is far worse, far more dangerous. One Ron Shoval is more
    effective in crushing dissent than a thousand street gangs. Those
    are the people who really hold the key to a complete breakdown of
    the façade of Israeli democracy.

    We attempted to describe the regime of manufactured fear and
    psychological support for the war, penetrating all aspects of life
    in all directions. For the vast majority of the country this fear is
    disproportionate to the actual threat. We described also a climate
    of threat of violence and violence directed against any form of
    dissent. In an atmosphere of pending emergency dissent is forbidden
    and any government action addressing the collective paranoia from
    the threat of Hamas is seen in a positive light. Needless to say,
    the government does nothing to curb the climate of violence against
    dissenters. Instead it incites it with reckless disregard to its
    potentially disastrous consequences. We do not fear to go and
    demonstrate, we are still able to do that with reasonable safety,
    but staying safe on the street is a slightly more complicated task
    than calculating where the nearest building entrance is in case of a
    siren alarm. This regime of collective fear and collective
    mobilization in support of the war is so intense, that our '??war
    vacation'?? is starting to feel like we took the wrong flight and
    landed in North Korea.

    'They are all animals'?? a tattooed man in his 30s muttered in our
    direction as we just got up to pay for our coffee. "Are you sure ALL
    of them are?" one of us replied later contemplating the stupidity of
    a casual response that could have easily provoked violence. Hamas is
    seen as a mortal, inhuman enemy, which must be crushed, decimated.
    In line with Prime Minister Netanyahu it is for many heir to Amalek
    in ancient times and Hitler. This is no apology but Israelis have
    been traumatized by the savage campaigns of suicide bombings of
    Hamas beginning in the 1990s, and so it is psychologically
    impossible for many to acknowledge that however criminal the actions
    of military resistance to the occupation sometimes are, in fact as
    soon as Hamas took power over Gaza in 2006 it became an intimate
    strategic partner of the militant Israeli government. Mash'al and
    Bibi are caught like lovers on an airplane about to crash in a
    deadly embrace for their own survival. Although the IDF now deals
    Hamas a military blow, the government is in fact desperate to keep
    the organization somehow alive. Military sources said from the
    outset of the operation that the purpose of the invasion this time
    is/ not/ to '??break Hamas.'?? Hamas'?? demands for a ceasefire in
    turn reflect just how addicted it became to the crumbs falling from
    the Israeli government table. The script for a ceasefire was already
    written before the ground invasion began. It is a matter of ending
    the bloody spectacle with a mere semblance of two sides mutually
    bettering their positions. The tragedy of course is that so many
    stand-ins and movie extras must die so spectacularly in vain for the
    status quo of occupation-resistance to continue. It may sound crazy,
    given all that we have said so far about Israel in the grip of
    fascism, but right to left people understand perfectly well the
    futility of the bloodshed. They already talk about the next round as
    inevitable. Depressed and helpless to stop it many express confusion
    and are simply torn between their instinct of victimization and
    sense of horror at the high price in human life. What is entirely
    lost or powerfully sublimated is the consequence of being implicated
    in and authorizing crimes against humanity. Israelis consider the
    war of position between Hamas and their government to be an
    existential war, and the conduct of their enemy, they feel, absolves
    them from any accountability. In their battle of survival, real and
    imaginary, it only makes sense to let the enemy die and verify the
    killing (vidu hariga). In this savage place no laws of war apply.

    Our children's renewed Israeli passports arrived just before the
    ground invasion. Staring at their pictures, Israeli IDs and passport
    numbers, the thought crossed our minds - why can't they be spared
    this terrible burden? Why should they carry an identity associated
    with cruelty, horrors, war, occupation, apartheid, crimes against
    humanity? They are Dutch kids after all, fluent in Hebrew but with a
    thick Amsterdam accent. Why can't they just sleep in their beds
    safely without their parents agonizing about children killed in
    their name? We should go home to Amsterdam or join our relatives
    vacationing in la Palma, a Canary island. This war vacation and the
    summer disaster in the Netherlands made us aware of our fragility,
    temporariness, and inability to control what is happening in our
    environment. It also sharpened our differences. At times like these
    mom is better off here in this normal-savage place where she is
    from, and where she directly partakes in efforts to stop the war.
    For dad it is crazy to be here, where he is surrounded by supporters
    of war crimes, who seem superficially normal and go about their
    normal lives. The kids, they just soak up the sun and enjoy
    themselves tremendously, their family and friends keep them happy.
    Their happiness and safety is comforting, but what would we say when
    they start asking us: mom, dad, what is war, who is doing it, and
    why can'??t you stop it?

    Hilla Dayan and PW Zuidhof


    =====

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